Laptops and shared memory for video

[jay-R5TnC2l8y5lBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org (jay-R5TnC2l8y5lBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org)]

Few things to consider:

First its a bad time to buy a windows system.  Windows 7 comes out in a month.  Any system you buy now will come with vista and a free upgrade to win7.  Win7s primary advantage over vista is how much better it runs on laptops and netbooks. Its hard to say how smoothly and upgrade will go after using the system for a month...

Second its been shown that vista and win7 do get a preformance boost from a decent graphics processor.  Much of the ui processing is offloaded to the gpu.  This doesnt really have much to do with integrated vs dedicated memory, but I wouldn't skimp on the gpu, and most decent laptop gpus will have atleast 256 dedicated.

Stay away from the real high end cpus, gpus, ect.  A dual core or low end quad is more than enough processing.  4gb of ram is good as well.  The higher end you go the more power they eat and heat they produce, and it doesn't sound like she needs the power. 

As for moores law paying a premium for the latest and greatest goes against everything moores law shows.  Paying double for a 20% increase now doesn't make sense when in 2 years you can buy a system twice as powerful for the same price.  Also for most people processing power is a moot point. 90% of what she does is limited by her internet connection...

Finally figure out how she really will be using the system before deciding on size.  Big screens are nice but so is portability.

------Original Message------
From: David Kramer
Sender: discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org
To: BLU
Subject: Laptops and shared memory for video
Sent: Sep 18, 2009 1:02 AM

I need to buy a new laptop for my daughter to replace her current IBM
Thinkpad T42, because it's infected with VIRTUMONDE, a very
hard-to-remove virus, and is experiencing other weird problems, like
spontaneously typing backwards, fonts appearing very tiny, etc.  I think
it's a mistake because clearly this is a software problem not a hardware
problem, but I'm being overruled ;)

OK, enough bitching.  I'm looking at moderately powerful laptops.  She
doesn't do gaming, but heavy browser/chat/email/word/photo editing.  I
would like to get at least dual core of some sort, so it will still be
useful when she gets up to more serious work.  She needs a good deal of
RAM because she tends to run it for a week or more without shutting
down.  And yes, it has to be running Windows (school work and all).
Recommendations welcome, but that's not the reason I'm writing this.

I've always felt video cards that steal main memory were "icky".  If my
laptop comes with 3GB RAM, I want to be able to use 3GB RAM.  It also
seems very inefficient to me to jump across different busses to
read/write video RAM from the video card.  But there are quite a few
laptops with "dynamic video memory" that are otherwise acceptable.

Am I being too picky?  Is this a non-issue, as long as the system has
3GB or 4GB?

Thanks.
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